Monday, December 31, 2012

JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are two of the banks involved in the current negotiations. (photo: New York Magazine)

By Jessica Silver-Greenberg, The New York Times

31 December 12

anking
regulators are close to a $10 billion settlement with 14 banks that
would end the government's efforts to hold lenders responsible for
foreclosure abuses like faulty paperwork and excessive fees that may
have led to evictions, according to people with knowledge of the
discussions.

Under the settlement, a significant amount of the
money, $3.75 billion, would go to people who have already lost their
homes, making it potentially more generous to former homeowners than a
broad-reaching pact in February between state attorneys general and five
large banks. That set aside $1.5 billion in cash relief for Americans.

Most of the relief in both agreements is meant for
people who are struggling to stay in their homes and need the banks to
reduce their payments or lower the amount of principal they owe.

The $10 billion pact would be the latest in a series
of settlements that regulators and law enforcement officials have
reached with banks to hold them accountable for their role in the 2008
financial crisis that sent the housing market into the deepest slump
since the Great Depression. As of early 2012, four million Americans had
been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and a huge amount of
abandoned homes swamped many states, including California, Florida and
Arizona.

Federal agencies like the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Justice Department are continuing to pursue the banks
for their packaging and sale of troubled mortgage securities that
imploded during the financial crisis.

Housing advocates were largely unaware of the latest
rounds of secret talks, which have been occurring for roughly a month.
But some have criticized the government for not dealing more harshly
with bankers in light of their lax standards for making loans and
packaging them as investments, as well as their problems with modifying
troubled loans and processing foreclosures.

uffering an election hangover after having been told by Fox News that Mitt Romney's victory was a sure thing (a "landslide"
predicted by Dick Morris), some Republicans have promised to break
their addiction to the right-wing news channel in the coming year.
Vowing to venture beyond the comforts of the Fox News bubble, strategists insist it's crucial that the party address its "choir-preaching problem."

Good luck.

This grand experiment
of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand
failure in 2012. But there's little indication that enough Republicans
will have the courage, or even the desire, to break free from Fox's firm
grip on branding the party.

For Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the network's
slash-and-burn formula worked wonders in terms of catering a hardcore,
hard-right audience of several million viewers. (Fox News is poised to post
$1 billion in profits this year.) But in terms of supporting a national
campaign and hosting a nationwide conversation about the country's
future, Fox's work this year was a marked failure.

And that failure helped sink any hopes the GOP had of winning the White House.

From the farcical, underwhelming GOP primary
that Fox News sponsored, through the general election campaign, it
seemed that at every juncture where Romney suffered a major misstep, Fox
misinformation hovered nearby. Again and again, Romney damaged his
presidential hopes when he embraced the Fox News rhetoric; when he ran
as the Fox News Candidate. READ MORE

The
main thing that has held Republicans together philosophically is the
belief in holding down taxes. Not one of them in Congress has voted for a
significant increase in more than two decades. Now that very issue is
tearing the GOP apart and making it an all-but-ungovernable majority for
Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) to lead in the House.
Disarray is a word much overused in politics. But it barely
begins to describe the current state of chaos and incoherence as
Republicans come to terms with electoral defeat and try to regroup
against a year-end deadline to avert a fiscal crisis.

The
presidential election was fought in large measure over the question of
whether some Americans should pay more in taxes. Republicans lost that
argument with the voters, who polls show are strongly in favor of
raising rates for the wealthy.

But a sizable contingent within the
GOP doesn’t see it that way and is unwilling to declare defeat on a
tenet that so defines them. Nor are they prepared to settle for getting
the best deal they can, as a means of avoiding the tax hikes on
virtually everyone else that would take effect if no deal is reached. READ MORE

Trayvon Martin shot, killed Feb. 26

Sen. Chris Smith
of Fort Lauderdale said on Wednesday said his bill (SB 136) was inspired
by the unarmed 17-year-old boy's death in Sanford. Martin was shot by
neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman who is claiming
self-defense under the law.
One
key change would eliminate protection from prosecution for someone who
provokes violence or pursues a victim. The bill also would remove
automatic immunity from arrest or detention and clarify that a suspect
can be arrested following a questionable death.
It
is likely to face opposition from Republicans who control the
Legislature and backed the current law. A panel created by Gov. Rick
Scott has recommended no major changes.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Americans anxious to join the fight for stricter
gun-control laws in the wake of the Newtown school shooting are finding
there isn’t much of a fight to join—and the NRA is supremely organized.
David Freedlander reports.

Imagine you live in Connecticut, not far where the Sandy Hook massacre took place. Or, say, Oak Creek, Wisc., where a gunman shot and killed six at a Sikh temple in August. Or in Denver, Colo., near the Aurora movie theater, where 12 were shot in July.

Fed up, and maybe a little scared
for your safety, you decide that something needs to be done. But what?
You check out the nation’s most prominent gun control group, the Brady
Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, hoping to find an organization to join
or at least some simple steps you can take immediately to join the
fight—a march to attend, a congressman to pressure, news of legislation
coming up before key committees in your local state legislature. For
each state, the website
gives you a generic form to fill out to contact your state chapter,
which may be several towns over, a button to donate money to the group,
and a link to learn about local gun laws.

Compare this with the National Rifle Association,
which for years has been reaching out aggressively to would-be
supporters everywhere from college campuses to CPAC by culling
conservative email lists and by catching people at the point of sale of a
firearm. Indeed, if you are thinking about joining the NRA, it is
probably because the group has already reached out to you. READ MORE

Today’s nearly indescribable tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, where
twenty-seven people, including eighteen children, were shot to death
inside an elementary school, is at least the sixteenth mass shooting to
take place in America this year. The death toll is now at eighty-four.

Here is a list of every fatal mass shooting that’s taken place since
January 1—defined as multi-victim shootings where those killed were
chosen indiscriminately. The tragedies took place at perfectly random
places—at churches, movie theatres, soccer tournaments, spas,
courthouses and, now, an elementary school. But given the frequency of
these awful events, perhaps in the long view their occurrence isn’t so
random after all—it’s predictable. READ MORE

Connecticut State Police say a gunman who massacred 26 children and adults at an elementary school before committing suicide forced his way into the building.
By Tina Susman, Brian Bennett and Michael Muskal
December 15, 2012, 9:34 a.m.
NEWTOWN, Conn. -- The gunman in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history forced his way into a Connecticut elementary school, where he killed 26 children and adults before turning a weapon on himself, state police said Saturday, adding that they were continuing to search for evidence to explain how and why the rampage took place.
“We're doing everything we need to do to literally peel back the onion, layer by layer,” State Police spokesman, Lt. J. Paul Vance told reporters at a news conference. The gunman “was not voluntarily let into the school,” Vance said. “He forced his way in.”
Vance did not name the gunman, who has been identified by other law enforcement sources as Adam Lanza, 20, who lived in town with his mother, Nancy.
PHOTOS: Shooting at Connecticut school
Sources have said that Lanza began his spree by killing his mother and then driving to Sandy Hook Elementary School several miles away. At the school, those sources said, he fired two handguns, killing 20 children and six adults before killing himself. READ MORE

It is always tragic when a large number of people lose their lives,
but it is worse when the deaths are of children. This is a list of ten
of the worst massacres at schools.10. Cologne school massacre11 killed | 22 injured | Walter Seifert

“It is not written in our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.” I awoke this morning still shaken with these words in my head.

Yesterday I was in Ramadi and Fallujah. Instead of bringing a message
of caring, of empathy for their suffering and a desire for peace, my
presence as someone from the U.S, seemed to open wounds that are
unfathomably deep.

I sat in on a lecture, given in English, to maybe fifty or more young
men and women at a college in Ramadi. They were all about 22 and 23
years of age, in their last year of a 5-year program. That means they
were about 13 or 14 years old during the U.S. led invasion and beginning
of the occupation. I was invited to speak by the president as an
“honored guest” after the lecture. To my embarrassment the professor
graciously hurried through his lecture on my account. I had everyone’s
attention. It was awkward for me, and after introducing myself, I said I
would be grateful to hear from them. There was only silence. I am sure
my words sounded empty, trite and artificial.

Then a young man in the front row only a couple of feet from me said in
a quiet voice “We have nothing to say. The last years have been only
sad ones.” Again there was silence.

Sami, my host from Najaf and part of the Muslim Peacemaker Team, stood
and shared. He told the story of how, after the U.S. bombing assaults on
Fallujah, he and others came from the Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala,
to carry out a symbolic act of cleaning up rubble and trash in the
streets of Fallujah. This gesture, he said, melted hearts and healed
some of the brokenness between Sunni and Shia. He spoke of the
delegation of peacemakers from the United States who were just in Najaf
for twelve days, of the work to build bridges and seek reconciliation.

An impassioned young woman from the middle of the lecture hall spoke
up. It was obviously not easy for her. “It is not,” she said, “about
lack of water and electricity [something I had mentioned]. You have
destroyed everything. You have destroyed our country. You have destroyed
what is inside of us! You have destroyed our ancient civilization. You
have taken our smiles from us. You have taken our dreams!”
Someone asked, “Why did you this? What did we do to you that you would do this to us?”

Friday, December 14, 2012

In a special comment on Friday’s episode of “Moyers and Company,” the former press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson pointed out what he believes to be at the very core of corruption in Washington, D.C.: “the revolving door” between working in government and lobbying it. “[The] revolving…

The City of Baltimore recently issued a ticket to Daniel Doty for speeding 38 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone — but photos and video captured by the speed camera system showed that his car was stopped at a red light at the time. Doty told The Baltimore Sun that photos included with the ticket issued…

Bloomberg has an article today
highlighting the pay gap at McDonald’s. The whole piece is worth a read
but the beginning is particularly striking. It highlights Chicago man
Tyree Johnson, who holds positions at two different McDonald’s. Between
shifts he has to give himself a quick scrubbing in one of the
restaurant’s bathrooms because he can’t even show up for work at a
McDonald’s smelling like a McDonald’s.

“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at
a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s
worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40
hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

This is life in one of America’s premier growth industries. Fast-food
restaurants have added positions more than twice as fast as the U.S.
average during the recovery that began in June 2009.

Johnson’s circumstances look particularly grim when they’re compared,
as Bloomberg does, to the compensation enjoyed by executives whose pay
gives a whole new meaning to “McJob.” READ MORE

Maybe
it’s totally cool to be an oblivious racist these days. Whatever the
case, there have been unusually high rates of “playing Indian” this
year.

December 11, 2012

There is something insidiously ironic about being American Indian
during the fall of the 21st century. It all starts with Columbus Day to
mark our “discovery,” then moves right into the “it’s totally not racist
to dress up as a hypersexualized Indian” for Halloween parties, and
goes out with a bang on Thanksgiving when we celebrate the survival of
the Pilgrims and that harmonious, mutually beneficial relationship
forged between colonizers and Indigenous peoples everywhere! However
romanticized or factually inaccurate, these holidays happen to be the
three days when Native peoples actually enter the mass psyche of
American culture.

I don’t know about you, but I usually spend the autumn months
parading around in my Navajo Hipster panties, feather headdress (on loan
from model Karlie Kloss and singer Gwen Stefani), Manifest Destiny
T-Shirt and knee-high fringed moccasins made in Taiwan while watching a
Redskins game, smoking a pack of American Spirits, and eating
genetically modified Butter Ball turkey, because I’m just
that traditional.

Perhaps it was that warm Indian summer weather that seemingly made
non-natives so eager to sport culturally demeaning faux Indian apparel
and legitimize it under the guise of “ignorance” or “appreciation.”
Maybe it’s totally cool to be an oblivious racist these days. Whatever
the case, there have been unusually high rates of “playing Indian”
this year. READ MORE

Twinkie-maker Hostess continues to screw over its workers. The
company is in the process of complete liquidation and 18,000 unionized
workers are set to lose their jobs. More troubling – they could lose
their pensions.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal , Hostess’ CEO, Gregory Rayburn, essentially admitted
that his company stole employee pension money and put it toward CEO and
senior executive pay (aka “operations”). While this isn't technically
illegal, it's another sleazy theft by Hostess executives - who've paid
themselves handsomely while running their company into the ground. Just
last month, a judge agreed to let Hostess executives suck another $1.8
million out of the bankrupt company to pay bonuses to CEOs.

If there's no way to recover the money for the Hostess pension plans
for workers, then the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will have to foot
the bill to make sure workers get at least some of the retirement money
they paid in.

Hostess shows us clearly what Bain-style predatory capitalism is all
about: big bucks for the very few rich executives, layoffs and poverty
for the workers and their communities. READ MORE

A
law that seemed to happen overnight was actually years in the making,
but Gov. Snyder's election-year fear of a Koch-funded group may have
tipped the balance.

December 12, 2012

It seemed to happen so fast. Actually, it was years in the making: A
law designed to eviscerate the membership rolls of labor unions in the
state in which the mighty United Auto Workers makes its home was rammed
through both houses of the Michigan legislature and signed into law
Tuesday by Gov. Rick Snyder. As Wisconsin is to public employee unions,
so is Michigan to the unions of the manufacturing sector -- a place
emblematic of labor’s political sway, a force now diminished by the new
law.

Taken up in a lame-duck legislative session, the prospects for the
bill’s passage caught everybody off-guard, thanks to a sudden change of
heart by Snyder who had, throughout his term, expressed opposition to
any law that, like the one he just signed, would allow workers in union
shops -- such as those employed by the big-three automakers whose plants
account for more than 136,000 Michigan jobs -- to opt out of paying dues to the unions that represent them.

But Snyder faces re-election
in 2014, which means his campaign begins now, with this opening volley.
Had the legislature passed the law, drafted by the American Legislative
Exchange Council (the organization funded by billionaire brothers
Charles and David Koch that drafted Wisconsin’s anti-union law), and
Snyder failed to sign it, he might have faced fierce opposition from
Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded astroturf group that was also
instrumental in the passage of the Wisconsin law. Even worse (for him),
Snyder might have faced a primary challenge. READ MORE

Since the erosion of Americans' civil liberties depends on high
levels of public apathy, some of the most dangerous privacy breaches
take place incrementally and under the radar; if it invites comparisons
to Blade Runner or Orwell, then someone in the PR department
didn't do their job. Meanwhile, some of the biggest threats to privacy,
like insecure online data or iPhone GPS tracking, are physically
unobtrusive and therefore easily ignored. And it'll be at least a year or two until the sky is overrun by spy drones.

So when a method of surveillance literally resembles a prop or plot
point in a sci-fi movie, it helps to reveal just how widespread and
sophisticated commercial and government monitoring has become. Here are
five recent developments that seem almost unreal in their dystopian
creepiness.

1. Buses and street cars that can hear what you say .
You can't really go anywhere in America without being tracked by
surveillance cameras. But seeing what people do is not enough; according
to a report by the Daily, cities all over the country are literally bugging public transportation.

In San Francisco, city officials have plans to install surveillance
cameras that record sound on 357 buses and trolley cars, the Daily
reported. Eugene, Oregon and Columbus, Hartford and Athens, Georgia,
also have audio recording plans in the works. The systems have the
capacity to filter background noise and hone in on passengers'
conversations. READ MORE

The research, published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, is by three University of Michigan psychologists led by Terri Conley .
Last year, she authored a paper that challenged evolutionary
psychology’s thesis that women are less interested in casual sex than
men. Men have a better chance of passing down their genes to a new
generation if they sow their seed widely, according to that widely circulated evolutionary psychology theory ,
while women’s odds increase if they’re in a stable relationship in
which the man helps raise their children. Thus a different set of deep,
unconscious impulses lead men to be more promiscuous than women.

In contrast, Conley’s research
suggested that, under the right circumstances—that is, when the
experience promises to be safe and pleasant—women are just as likely as
men to engage in casual sex. Her new paper adds stigma and the prospect
of backlash to that equation, and finds they inhibit women’s choices. READ MORE

(Please note that today, "slut" has also become a term of endearment, meant to signify that "this sex is so good it must be illegal". Some modern women can be insulted if not called a slut, but only in private, where it's absence would mean that you did not enjoy the sex.)

Conservatives are freaking out about the death of the traditional family. But the family appears to be getting better.

December 12, 2012

Are we living in a post-familial age? According to a new report, The Rise of Post-Familialism: Humanity's Future? ,
the answer is yes: the traditional family unit is slowly dying out as
more people choose to forgo children and even marriage. As a result,
society is economically imperilled, lacking the necessary workforce to
support older generations. We're also "values-challenged", entering a
brave new world of materialistic indulgence, selfishness and protracted
adolescence.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? Luckily, almost none of it is true.

People around the world are indeed
delaying childbearing and marriage, and larger numbers of people never
marry or reproduce at all. But that is not synonymous with a moral
decline, or selfish decadence. It represents an uptick in women's
rights, a commitment to creating the family one wants, and wider choices
for everyone.

It's no shock that the drop in the number
of children a woman has came along with the advent of the birth control
pill. The countries with the highest birth rates aren't just highly
religious; they're poor, have abominable human rights records and lack
access to reliable birth control. Contrary to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's position , it is not in fact the country with the most babies that wins: if that was the case, Nigeria would be running the show. READ MORE

Asia-focused bank HSBC said on Tuesday it would pay US authorities a record $1.92 billion to settle allegations of money laundering that were said to have helped Mexican drug cartels, terrorists and Iran.

HSBC receives get-out-of-jail-free card in a real-life game of Monopoly.

December 12, 2012

The New York Times reports this week
that megabank HSBC has escaped criminal prosecution for money
laundering that probably funded terrorists and narcotics traffickers.
Why? Because regulators and prosecutors were petrified that an
indictment would undermine the entire financial system. The Times
quotes anonymous government sources who confessed fears about bringing
formal charges because doing so would be a "death sentence" for the
bank. So they let it off the hook.

That’s right, HSBC is officially above the law. Too-big-to-fail has become too-big-to-prosecute.

A year-long investigation found that the British banking giant had
blown right past federal laws by laundering billions of dollars from
Mexican drug trafficking and processing banned transactions on behalf of
Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma. A Wednesday Times article serves up vivid passages about the shady goings-on, including HSBC officials working closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorist organizations. READ MORE

The
film Lincoln ends after the Amendment that ended slavery throughout the
nation passed. But for blacks, earning the rights of citizenship was to
prove a much more protracted war.

December 10, 2012

Lincoln is a magnificent movie. But as I left the theatre, to echo
Paul Harvey, the late radio commentator, I wanted to know “the rest of
the story.”

The movie begins in January 1865, exactly 2 years after Lincoln
issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves of the
Confederate States “thenceforward and forever free. ”

As Lincoln himself told Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles issuing
the Proclamation was a “military necessity. We must free the slaves or
be ourselves subdued.” Indeed, Lincoln wanted to issue the Proclamation
in July 1862 but Secretary of State William Seward cautioned that the
series of military defeats suffered by the Union army that year would
lead many to view such a move simply as an act of desperation. The
victory at Antietam in September gave Lincoln the opportunity he needed.

The Emancipation Proclamation helped the Union immeasurably. It
converted a war to preserve the union into a war of liberation, a change
that gained widespread support in key European nations. And by
rescinding a 1792 ban on blacks serving in the armed forces, the
Proclamation solved the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the
Union Army in the face of a declining number of white volunteers. During
the war nearly 200,000 blacks, most of them ex-slaves joined the Union
Army, giving the North additional manpower needed to win the war. As
historian James M. McPherson writes, “The proclamation officially turned
the Union army into an army of liberation…And by authorizing the
enlistment of freed slaves into the army, the final proclamation went a
long step toward creating that army of liberation.”

Abolitionists viewed arming ex-slaves as a major step toward toward
giving them equality. Frederick Douglass urged blacks to join the army
for this reason. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass
letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his
shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can
deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” READ MORE

(Reuters) - The U.S. military judge overseeing the Guantanamo
prosecution of five alleged conspirators in the September 11 attacks has
issued an order maintaining secrecy over the defendants' experiences in
clandestine CIA prisons.
The protective order
safeguarding classified information in the case was signed on December 6
by the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, and unsealed on Wednesday.
It
is not limited to documents formally labeled "Top Secret" by the CIA or
produced by the government, but also prohibits disclosure of the
defendants own "observations and experiences" in the secret CIA
detention, rendition and interrogation program.
Pohl
is the chief judge overseeing the war crimes tribunals established by
the United States to try foreign captives on terrorism-related charges
at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.The
defendants in the 9/11 case, including the alleged mastermind of the
hijacked plane plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Pakistani,
Yemeni and Saudi captives, face charges that could lead to their
execution. READ MORE

Friday, December 7, 2012

Spartan
multi clipboard is THE number one upgrade to the Windows operating system.

Why
a multi clipboard?

Simple. A multiple
item clipboard doesn't just mean that you can copy more than once before you
paste!

It means that every single piece of useful information that appears on your
screen can be saved for future reference simply by copying it.

Why
Spartan ? Are there not other multi clipboards?

There are lots of
other multi clipboards but they all suffer from various drawbacks. Some only
copy text. Some copy graphics but cannot paste them into Outlook or Windows
mail. Some cannot copy combined text and graphics as in a a clip from MS Word.
Worst of all, most other clipboards stop at just saving the information. What
is the point of saving a web page address if you cannot click on it to visit
the page. With Spartan, you can visit copied web sites. You can start email
to copied email addresses. You can open copied files and folders. If you have
a modem, you can even dial copied phone numbers.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Norman Williams votes in the Nov. 6 election. He received a life sentence under California's three-strikes law for a series of petty thefts and burglaries but was released in 2009. Photo by Michael Romano.

It was slain by a couple of professors, their students, and a district attorney who wanted reform.

In last week’s election, California voters made a decision that was
at once historic and obvious: They reformed the state’s infamously harsh
three-strikes law. Proposition 36, the ballot measure that passed with
an amazing 69 percent of the vote, changed the state’s three-strikes law
so that offenders who have committed no serious and violent crime will
no longer go to prison for life. The vote was historic because when
voters see crime measures on the ballot, they almost always pull the
lever in favor of retribution, not mercy. And yet this time the result
was also a no-brainer: The state was locking up petty thieves and
shoplifters for life, and given the chance to stop this, the voters
resoundingly did.

The original three-strikes ballot measure passed in California in
1994, following the terrible murder-kidnapping of 12-year-old Polly
Klaas, who was snatched from her own slumber party. The killer turned
out to be a criminal with a violent past who was out on parole. That was
all voters needed to hear to pass a measure that said it would keep
“career criminals who rape women, molest children and commit murder
behind bars where they belong.”

But as the Los Angeles Times pointed out in an editorial
this week, it’s not clear that Californians intended to go beyond the
rapists, murderers, and molesters to permanently lock up offenders like Norman Williams, whom I wrote about for the New York Times Magazine
two years ago. Williams’ third strike was a conviction for petty theft
in 1997: He stole the floor jack of a tow truck when he was homeless and
addicted to drugs. His earlier crimes also weren’t the work of a
hardened and dangerous career criminal: In 1982, he burglarized an empty
apartment while it was being fumigated. After he was robbed at gunpoint
on the way out, he helped the police find the stuff he’d stolen. In
1992, he tried to steal tools from an art studio. When the owner
confronted him, he dropped everything and ran. READ MORE

And in Minnesota, retired State Department
employee Byron David Smith allegedly wounded and then killed two
teenagers, Haile Kifer and Nicholas Brady, who broke into his house on
Thanksgiving, apparently on a hunt for prescription drugs.

This week also saw three teen boys charged with murder in Alabama
after their friend, Summer Moody, was shot in April. When a man caught
the four breaking into fishing cottages in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, he
allegedly fired a warning shot that killed Summer in what a district
attorney called a "tragic accident." On Wednesday, a grand jury indicted
the three boys, not the man who shot Summer.

SYG laws will eventually, if left to their own devises, make us effectively our own jailers, afraid to even walk the streets for fear of one another. This intolerable situation will lead us to beg our authorities to take absolute power, to remove guns from our society, as the only way we can survive as a nation. How ironic is it that the 2nd Amendment is leading us back into dictatorship?

Sign the anti SYG petition here; and spread the word so that others can do so as well. Sure it's not going to overturn the laws that many states have already passed, but it will make the showing needed to empower others to move on this important matter. Thanks for all that you do.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

We can't count our votes on time. The road to CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus' downfall veered straight off Interstate 4 and into the mansion of "Tampa Kardashian" Jill Kelley.
We order government studies to answer questions that are already
painfully obvious such as whether texting and driving is dangerous
(Yes!).

And when we have the opportunity to do something serious — something
that could make us a leader for improvements and reform — we waste it

I'm talking about fixing the law that made Central Florida the
epicenter just nine months ago for explosive debates about racism, gun
rights and when one person has a right to kill another.

The law at the center of it all known as "stand your ground" caused two prosecutors to come to two wildly different conclusions.

People rightfully began to scrutinize "stand your ground," a 2005 law written by National Rifle Association lobbyist and Tallahassee puppet master Marion Hammer that removed the "duty to retreat" from Florida's self-defense statute.

In other words, if you believe you are in danger, Florida law says
there's no need to run away or get yourself out of the situation if you
can. You can just pull out your piece and fire, with immunity from
prosecution.

Trayvon's death shined a light on other cases that had invoked "stand
your ground": a gang member who got off scot-free for a shooting. A
case of road rage that ended with one man stabbing another with an ice
pick.

Feeling pressured to do something, the governor named a task force to study the law and make recommendations.

But this was nothing more than political theater. Gov. Rick Scott stacked the committee with members already convinced it was a good law and not in need of major reform. READ MORE

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

A look at the "Batman killer" front pages.

Every time there's a mass shooting, I remember this piece of footage from Charlie Brooker's BBC series Newswipe.
In it, a forensic psychiatrist outlines the guidelines for news
reporting of such a tragedy, assuming that your aim is to prevent
further ones.

He says:

If you don't want to propagate more mass murders...
Don't start the story with sirens blaring.
Don't have photographs of the killer.
Don't make this 24/7 coverage.
Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.
Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.
Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.

Here are this morning's front pages. Judge for yourself who has done a good job of heeding that advice, and who hasn't. See More Newspaper Front Pages

It could be a very unlucky time to be the lucky winner of Wednesday’s
$425 million Powerball jackpot. Whether Congress and the White House
reach an agreement on deficit reduction by the end of the year or not,
new taxes on the rich are bound to take a large chunk of the prize
money.
Financial advisors usually recommend lottery winners spread their
winnings out over several years to avoid temptations of spending the
money too quickly. But with the fiscal cliff threatening to shrink the
prize money through a bundle of new tax hikes, advisors are recommending
the winner takes the lump sum as soon as possible. “A lump sum could
save you millions in taxes,” Matthew Goff, a financial adviser in
Houston, told Marketwatch.

Conservative groups are less than amused with Republicans who are considering raising revenue in exchange for entitlement cuts in fiscal cliff negotiations.

Brent Bozell, chairman of For America, a conservative action group, wrote an angry letter to Republican leaders Tuesday, blasting the lawmakers for putting tax increases on the table.

“You led the Republican Party for two years claiming emphatically that the tax increase on “the wealthy”... is really a devastating tax hike on small business owners that would kill jobs and decimate any kind of economic recovery,” the letter said. “Now conservatives see daily stories asserting that the GOP agrees with the President that “revenues are on the table” and GOP elite are all over the airwaves asking if the Tea Party will care if “a few multi-millionaires pay more in taxes.”

The group said that by agreeing to raise revenue, Republicans are only emboldening Democrats to demand higher taxes. “Liberals feel comfortable making such outlandish proposals because they feel you are weak enough that you will continue to surrender to evermore higher taxes having capitulated once already. They will never be satisfied. You know that.”
The letter was sent just days after a handful of senior Republicans publicly distanced themselves from conservative activist Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge.
- Read the letter here
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Small businesses big enough to hit these thresholds incorporate to escape them.
The real target is the Corporate Executives of public corporations, who can now take their compensation in salaries plus benefits, because the top income brackets are now low enough, to make "raiding the corporate treasury via compensation and benefits packages", a viable option.

If taxes on the proceeds of these corporate treasury raids are high enough to prohibit them, then corporate executives will have to take their compensation in stock and options. The difference is that, to get and preserve the capital gains they get from stock and options compensation deals, they must ensure that the company performs well. That means that as the company performs well, not only do they get the high pay they seek, but shareholders get benefits too. That puts more money into the economy, than would happen if only these executives get higher salaries, which are paid them, regardless of company performance. Many taking herculean pay, even while the corps they manage sink beneath the waves.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Koch Industries Executive Vice President David H. Koch,
left, poses for a photo with Julia Koch during the opening
night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on
Sept. 26, 2011.

By Asjylyn Loder and David Evans -
Oct 3, 2011 1:28 PM ET

Bloomberg Markets Magazine

In May 2008, a unit of Koch
Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held
companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired
compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the
management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less
than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to
win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova-
Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week
later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an
investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets
magazine reports in its November issue.

By September of that year, the researchers had found
evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six
countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business
director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.

“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,”
Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details
of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court
ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never
before been reported by the media.

Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit
payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her
from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009,
calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators
substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for
wrongful termination.
Obsessed with Secrecy

Telling a lie may not make your nose grow like Pinocchio but it does send its temperature soaring, according to Spanish scientists. A rise in anxiety will see the tip of the nose heat up - while making a 'great mental effort' will help in cooling it down - says the University of Granada's Emilio Gómez Milán and Elvira Salazar López. READ MORE

In a little-noticed yet significant development on election day,
Minnesota voters defeated a constitutional amendment that would have
required them to present a government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot.
It was the first time voters had rejected a voter ID ballot initiative
in any state.

In May 2011, a poll showed that 80 percent of Minnesotans supported a
photo ID law. “Nearly everyone in the state believed a photo ID was the
most common-sense solution to the problem of voter fraud,” says Dan
McGrath, executive director of Take Action Minnesota, a progressive
coalition that led the campaign against the amendment. “We needed to
reframe the issue. We decided to never say the word ‘fraud.’ Instead we
would only talk about the cost, complications and consequences of the
amendment.” According to the coalition, the photo ID law would have
disenfranchised eligible voters (including members of the military and
seniors) dumped an unfunded mandate on counties and imperiled same-day
voter registration. On election day, 52 percent of Minnesotans opposed
the amendment.

The amendment’s surprising defeat has ramifications beyond Minnesota.
“There’s been an assumption of political will for restricting the right
to vote,” says McGrath. “No, there’s not.” The amendment backfired on
the GOP. “Voter ID did not drive the conservative base to turn out in
the way that Republicans thought it would,” adds McGrath. “Instead, it
actually inspired progressive voters, who felt under siege, to fight
stronger and turn out in higher numbers.” The minority vote nearly
doubled in the state, compared with 2008. Minnesota was a microcosm of
the national failure of the GOP’s voter suppression strategy. READ MORE

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA:
raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into
“mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David
Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC
provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make
their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.

No one knows how much the Kochs have given ALEC in total, but the
amount likely exceeds $1 million—not including a half-million loaned to
ALEC when the group was floundering. ALEC gave the Kochs its Adam Smith
Free Enterprise Award, and Koch Industries has been one of the select
members of ALEC’s corporate board for almost twenty years. The company’s
top lobbyist was once ALEC’s chairman. As a result, the Kochs have
shaped legislation touching every state in the country. Like ideological
venture capitalists, the Kochs have used ALEC as a way to invest in
radical ideas and fertilize them with tons of cash.

Take environmental protections. The Kochs have a penchant for paying
their way out of serious violations and coming out ahead. Helped by Koch
Industries’ lobbying efforts, one of the first measures George W. Bush
signed into law as governor of Texas was an ALEC model bill giving
corporations immunity from penalties if they tell regulators about their
own violation of environmental rules. Dozens of other ALEC bills would
limit environmental regulations or litigation in ways that would benefit
Koch.
ALEC’s model legislation reflects parts of the Kochs’ agenda that
have little to do with oil profits. Long before ALEC started pushing
taxpayer-subsidized school vouchers, for example, the Koch fortune was
already underwriting attacks on public education. David Koch helped
inject the idea of privatizing public schools into the national debate
as a candidate for vice president in 1980. A cornerstone of the
Libertarian Party platform, which he bankrolled, was the call for
“educational tax credits to encourage alternatives to public education,”
a plan to the right of Ronald Reagan. Several pieces of ALEC’s model
legislation echo this plan. READ MORE

Friday, November 23, 2012

Published: November 22, 2012

CHICAGO — Come January, more than two-thirds of the states will be under
single-party control, raising the prospect that bold partisan agendas —
on both ends of the political spectrum — will flourish over the next
couple of years.

Though the Nov.6 election maintained divided
government in Washington, the picture is starkly different in capitals
from California to Florida: one party will hold the governor’s office
and majorities in both legislative chambers in at least 37 states, the
largest number in 60 years and a significant jump from even two years
ago.

“For quite a period of time, people were voting for divided government
because they wanted compromise, middle ground,” said State Senator
Thomas M. Bakk, the minority leader — and soon to be majority leader —
in Minnesota. Democrats there seized control of both legislative
chambers, creating single-party rule in St. Paul for the first time in
more than two decades. “But they’ve come to realize that compromise is
getting awfully hard to accomplish. The parties have gotten too rigid.
Maybe this whole experiment with voting for divided government is
starting to wane. I think that’s what happened here.”

Twenty-four states will be controlled by Republicans, including Alaska
and Wisconsin, where the party took the State Senate, and North
Carolina, where the governorship changed hands. At least 13 states will
be Democratic, including Colorado, Minnesota and Oregon, where control
of the legislatures shifted, and California, where the already dominant
Democrats gained a supermajority in both chambers. (The situation in New
York, where the potential for single-party control by the Democrats
rests on the makeup of the Senate, is still uncertain.)

Power will be split in, at most, 12 capitals — the fewest, said Tim
Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures, since 1952.

So while President Obama and Republican leaders in Washington have made
postelection hints of an openness to compromise, many in the states may
see no such need.

“The fact is, they can do whatever they want now,” Chris Larson, the
Democrats’ newly chosen Senate minority leader in Wisconsin, said of the
Republicans in his state. He noted, glumly, that they have been holding
planning meetings behind closed doors since the election. READ MORE